Educating scientists of the future

A summary and transcript of the speeches

Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, was the keynote speaker at "Science Education: How Can We Measure Success?" the first of three special academic events commemorating the inauguration of President John Bassett. Alberts also received an honorary degree at the event.

A former faculty member and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, Alberts is a respected biochemist recognized for his work in biochemistry and molecular biology. He is one of the principal authors of "The Molecular Biology of the Cell," now in its third edition which is considered the leading advanced textbook in this field and used widely in U.S. colleges and universities. His most recent text, "Essential Cell Biology," is intended for a wider audience.

Alberts’ remarks, "Science Education: How Can We Measure Success?" (read below), followed a panel discussion with teachers and scholars including: Marion Guerra, a teacher at the Goddard School in Worcester; Pendred Noyce, a trustee of the Noyce Foundation and principal investigator of the science-education model known as PALMS; Matthew Adiletta, Intel Fellow and director of communication processor architecture at Intel Corporation in Hudson, Mass.; and Clark physics professor S. Leslie Blatt. Sandra Mayrand MBA ’91, director of the Regional Science Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, moderated the panel.

The panelists addressed such issues as assessing student learning in science, the effect of high-stakes testing on scientific curiosity, determining what scientists of the future need to know, and the education of future science teachers. During the discussion, Adiletta, who holds several patents and has more than 50 patents pending at Intel, shared his five basic characteristics of a successful scientist:

Curiosity–being able to tinker with a problem.
A voracious appetite for reading–especially about your subject area.
Problem-solving skills–breaking down complex problems into their less complex parts.
Self-reliance–learning how to learn.
Guts and desire–having a tenacity and a passion for the work at hand.

"Science Education: How Can We Measure Success?"

Monday • March 26, 2001 • Dana Commons

I can’t say that I look forward to talking after such a wonderful presentation of our panel. I thought that was a perfect introduction to what I want to say, and it illustrates something that I learned maybe five years ago when we founded a partnership with the San Francisco public schools by the University of California, San Francisco…There’s a lot of inspiration and wisdom and rethinking of what we all do as college faculty that we get by reaching out to the community, interacting with teachers and librarians and kids–and the kids as well. My favorite thing, and I hope I have time for this when I finish with the Academy, is playing around in second-grade classrooms. These kids are so full of life and so inquisitive, and as you go into an eighth-grade classroom they’re bored to death. Is it our fault or their fault? The answer is it’s our fault. That’s my answer.

Let me step back a minute before talking about the basis of this [symposium] and talk a little bit about science. It’s really a very important force in the world. It should be a more important force, and the people in our Academy and others are working to make it a more important force. I don’t have time to talk about that today. But the first thing about science that is truly remarkable is that it’s truly an international endeavor. Science is the same in Iran, in India, in China, as it is in the United States. You can’t say that about a lot of other subjects. Good science, good science education is the same everywhere throughout the world. And it’s striking to me as I travel–I spend way too much time in Iran, in Russia, in India, in China and other countries as well–it’s actually striking how scientists everywhere, whether or not our governments hate each other, have common values… For this reason, I think there’s a real chance for a world [in which] science [is used as] a communication tool and a basis of rationality, and make the role of science and scientists much more important internationally in all kinds of international decisions.

As a scientist, I have to give evidence for my assertion, so I have one slide, the first slide. This is a picture of the presidents of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Swedish Academies with myself at 7 a.m. in a Swiss MacDonalds. We are all very good friends–and this is only part of the group–and we are working together to try to create a higher profile for science across the world.

So, the second thing about science is that it has wonderful features. First of all, as our teachers said earlier, the world is a rational place…You know, Newton’s laws which relate to apples falling off of trees in a small space on the earth turned out to apply billions of light years out into the cosmos, and they explained all kinds of things about not only planetary motion but also led to tools to send people to Mars and all these amazing things…Cell biology, which is my field, is revolutionizing medicine and making the world a much safer place for us all to live in. I remind you that an average college graduate today will live to be 80 years old, and the life expectancy in [ancient] Rome was 28 years.

More broadly, science makes life safer by allowing us to see the consequences, because the world is an irregular place, an irrational place, it allows us to see the many consequences of present actions and predict something about the future. You know, we can tell that smoking is dangerous for us and we should avoid it. We can tell that electromagnetic fields from hair dryers are not dangerous for us and we can go ahead and dry our hair. And of course, it is always the labor of science to study devices that understand the world…

So, these are all the practical applications, but there are also wonderful intellectual resources, pleasures that we get from understanding the world. The next slide came from Richard Feynman, one of the best explicators of this view. He said, when he was talking to a group of physics teachers, said: "The world is so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air and in the flaming heat to reach the flaming heat of the sun, which is bound in to work the air into trees. And in the ash is fallen the part which did not come from the air, but came from the solid earth instead. These things are beautiful things, and the concept of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others."

Feynman made a series of video tapes, called "Fun to Imagine," and this is typical of the way he thought, spontaneously it seems, about the wonderful world. And it gives you an appreciation of where you are and how amazing it is that the world is the way it is, which you get to understand through science.

Last but not least, another good thing about science and that is when we spread science, we spread scientific values. My list of scientific values is shown on the next slide. Honesty. This doesn’t mean that scientists are better people than other people, but if a scientist publishes something that is dishonest, no one will pay attention to his or her work again…In order to be a scientist, you have to be honest, otherwise you’ll never be able to succeed.

There’s a bit of generosity, which is a powerful part of our enterprise and we spend a lot of time, and the faculty here I’m sure are typical of that, in helping students and others who are younger and less experienced than we are to be successful as scientists. And probably most important, the nature of approach to knowledge and the fact that judgements are made based on evidence, logical argument, and not on the basis of who said this…You have to have respect [for] opinions, irrespective of their source, in order to be successful in science.

There’s also bad news of course: The accelerated pace of science and technology leaves society much more confused…and there’s a quote on that from the book called "The Trouble with Science" by Robin Dunbar: "Neither the proverbial man on the street nor many of those in the humanities have any real understanding of what scientists do or how science works. Science has become a form of magic practiced by an elite priesthood whose methods have been protected through a long and arduous [system]…of secret arts and rites…from which the layman is firmly excluded."

I think this feeling that science is somehow magical and the failure to understand it–and I must add that I had a program in San Francisco with elementary teachers, and they had the wrong kind of science in school. And almost 100 percent of them thought science was magic, and they were afraid of it, until they experienced the kind of science we’re talking about today. Then they loved it. So, we can solve this problem, in elementary school we can solve this problem, if we do the right thing.

I think this feeling helps explain the craziness that you often see in our society, the mysticism. Carl Sagan’s last book was called "Demon Haunted World," and in it, he describes all these crazy things people believe in: Flying saucers, aliens from space…And he pointed out the importance of science as a stabilizing force on society, a rationality.

Today’s world is ever more full of hucksters. It’s becoming worse because anybody can publish anything on the Internet. [It] used to be you had to get a publisher [in order] to publish, and more than ever there’s a sense that our democracy depends on some stability of judgement, of individuals being able to make wise decisions both for themselves and for their communities. Should I dispose of my garbage in an incinerator? Should I get my kid vaccinated? Are genetically modified foods really dangerous?–all of those kinds of questions.

Now, we can spend our resources protecting people from all dangers in the world that people can imagine, but if we do so, we won’t be able to ward off the real ones. And moreover, we’ll have a society that’s living in constant fear…What I mean by an understanding of science is again, as before on the panel, not knowing all of the facts of scientific discoveries. That’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about. It’s understanding how science works and how these mystical things people see happening in science, how they are derived in a general sense. That science is a discipline that creates these wonderful pieces of knowledge enlarges our sphere of influence of what we can do in the world, but it’s not magic.

For this reason really, a major role of the National Academy of Sciences has become to bring science into the lives of all Americans, as well as a lot of people around the world…That’s why I need to introduce to you the National Academy. Now, you have two Academy members sitting in your midst [Clark geographers B.L. Turner II and Susan Hanson], but I’m sure they haven’t tried to tell everybody what the Academy is.…The basic idea is that we form a bridge between the real world of science, what’s happening in the United States and government…We publish one report every working day on average, that’s about 200 reports a year.

How did I get to be president of the Academy? I was sitting in my office in 1987 at the University of California, San Francisco, really enjoying the fact that I had nothing to do with science policy. I used to read about what the National Academy of Sciences was doing and think, "Thank god somebody is doing it, I don’t have time for this." Then I got a phone call asking if I would chair a committee to study whether there should be a special project in the United States to map the sequence of the human genome. They had already set the whole committee. They had several Nobel prize winners, including some who had persecuted me as a graduate student. So, of course, I thought, "Why should I be chairman? I haven’t even thought about this." They said, "Well, that’s why we wanted you to be chair because we have people on both sides of this issue who have already thought and talked about this." They wanted somebody who hadn’t said anything and hadn’t thought anything, and that was me.

The next slide shows the result, "The Mapping and Sequencing of the Human genome," published in 1988, which in fact redefined the project and was very successful…Since that was successful, they asked me to do more stuff like that and eventually they asked me whether I’d be willing to come to Washington and be president of the Academy and I said, "No"…They thought that since I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t abuse the power, so, I guess they wanted to find somebody who didn’t want it. At any rate, it’s been interesting. I have enjoyed it. It’s been challenging.

This kind of report is what we call Policy for Science. We just published a major report on postdoctoral-level science…Most of our reports are of a different kind. They are really using science to make public policy…The next slide shows a typical example about your hairdryer, "Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields." And this is a case where the public had been badly scared by lots of press articles. We did 500 scientific studies over the next 17 years to prove there was no evidence of health hazards from exposure to electric and magnetic fields.

The next slide shows another report, more recent ["To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System"]. This received more publicity than any report we’ve had. It’s about medical errors, and it was all over the press. It turns out that 70 percent of people in the United States have heard about that report. Ninety-nine point nine percent have now forgotten it, but it had unbelievable publicity.

So, all this is very good. We publish all these books. These are aimed at policy makers and university professors and they go to libraries. But more policy makers will tell you that they have to respond to public opinion. CNN polls have a big influence on what our congress does and what our administration does. It’s not enough to produce scholarly reports for the libraries and for the government now. We have to reach the public and disseminate what we find. So, when I came to the Academy in 1993 as president…there was this Internet… In 1994, the World Wide Web was developed, and we immediately said this is exactly what we need in order to get our reports up. And now we have every one of our reports up on the Web in full text, and anybody can read them for free. The next slide shows our Web site (www.nas.edu). We have nearly 2,000 full text reports up on the Web at that address. You can access them anywhere in the world…

That’s one way of trying to get a more scientific society, but we have to worry about the other end of it. Who’s reading this stuff? We need an educated public to assimilate the decisions scientists make about policy and about wise actions, and for themselves as individuals. Should I vaccinate my child, for example, is a very important question. We need to spread science, science understanding. One way to do that is to try to make people understand what science is, and this has been a major effort since I became president [of the Academy]. The next slide shows a series called "Beyond Discovery." These are short, eight-page pamphlets written for congress-people and the general public, and they’re all up on the Web site, of course. They take something the public values, like "The Hepatitis B Story" about the vaccine for Hepatitis B, and explain how that came out of science. But it didn’t come out of magic science, it came out of a whole range of knowledge that was accumulated over many years…That’s the power of science. It is something that people value and respect….

However, it’s hard to educate adults. Most adults have already made their mind up about things, and so, our receptive audience is the kids in school. And therefore, we’ve had a major effort in education. This started when the governors in 1989, led by Bill Clinton who was then governor of Arkansas, who said that we were suffering. Our educational system was suffering so much in comparison to other countries that they wanted voluntary national standards…so that they as governors could benefit and improve their education systems. This was a dramatic change.

In 1991, the Academy [took on] this task. It took us four years. It was the hardest report we’ve ever written. Just imagine trying to get the physicists to decide what physics everyone has to know by the end of 12th grade. And then you have the earth scientists do the earth sciences, and the biologists do biology. You end up with a thousand-page book. That’s where we were heading in the beginning. In the end, I decided as president of the Academy that I didn’t know most of what most 12 graders were supposed to know about science, and we had to do it a different way. So, we had the biologists decide the physics and the physicists decide the biology, and finally we succeeded. The next slide shows the 250-page book ["National Science Education Standards"]…

The next slide shows the table of contents, just to make a point that half of it is what every kid should know at the end of 4th, 8th and 12 grade; the other half is, what does testing look like? What is science teaching? Chapter three, the science teaching standards, is 25 pages, which really gives you a lot of respect for teaching, and every college teacher should really read that because all of us can learn a lot about teaching…

The three bottom lines for me…are science should be a course every year of school starting in kindergarten. In fact, every kindergarten is a science class. They investigate the world. It’s only when they get to first grade that they get text books and start memorizing 30 kinds of whales, or whatever. Science should be for all, not just for those who might be scientists or engineers, but for the reasons that were discussed [earlier]. Science is really for everybody. We all need those skills. And critically, science is not word definitions. Science is inquiry-based learning, learning how to think.

The next slide shows a science class in San Francisco. They don’t look like the science classes I had as a kid. The kids are noisy, they’re working in groups, they have well-structured activities, they’re guided, but they are doing inquiry. They’re arguing with each other about evidence and learning how to communicate, as well as to think like scientists. The Academy and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington have…developed science kits, which model the kind of curriculum we’re talking about…I find that if you want to really understand what we’re talking about, particularly in elementary science, just get one of these kits. It makes you rethink your whole college teaching, especially those college laboratories that we make people suffer through. It’s more like cooking and nothing to do with science.

The next slide shows, for example, this is the teacher’s guide. It’s really a box of stuff. This is a lesson on electric circuits. The next slide shows experiments with plants… But basically, there are a lot of good materials for elementary-school science, much less for middle school and very little for high school. Obviously, the place to start is in elementary science. But that’s why we need parents to understand that this is a different kind of science, and what we need is some way of communicating simply to parents. So, we produced a little booklet with a Ronald-Reagan type of saying on the top that we just keep saying over and over to try to get the message across: Every child a scientist, every child a scientist. What we mean is not that they will be a scientist but that they behave as they do in kindergarten. We just want to maintain that so when they get to 8th grade, they’re still excited about investigating the world as they were as five-year-olds.

The fundamental issue here really is to have the students struggle with the problem before they’re told the answer, to learn how to learn, to have respect for evidence, to be able to communicate logically and argue logically…This view of science education is central to all of education. It’s not an add on. My kids went to San Francisco public schools, and I was too busy to pay attention. I just remember when they got to seventh grade, they had a choice between two days a week of math, two days a week of science and two days a week of shop. This is not the way.

This way of thinking about science as being instrumental to developing thinking and process skills makes science a core subject and is central to all of education…So, there’s a broad sense that this kind of education is central and we need to get that message across because to most parents, science education is something that they hated. It was memorization of facts, and they don’t see why their kids should get it….

So, where are we today?…We generally, in most science teaching, rely on text books. You look at a science text book, even when they’ve been screened–in California, it was this mammoth process of spending all kinds of money to screen text books–and what you end up with…is drivel. Things that would drive you away from any kind of scholarship whatsoever, much less science, because it’s not interesting, it’s not science…So, the problem is we’re turning kids off not just to science, we’re turning them off to education.

The problem really is inertia. There’s a tremendous amount of inertia in society in general. In the education system, in particular, there is a stable equilibrium. The state and national exams are testing all those words in text books. And if you ask them why they are testing all those words in biology, they say that that’s what the teachers are teaching. And they’re teaching that because the text books have all the words in them. Then you ask why the text books are written with all those words in them, and they say that’s what tests are about. So, we’re locked in this no-win situation.

Unfortunately, in all that this equilibrium affects, most of the arrows are pointing at the teachers. They are the victims here. And if you ask my Academy members what the Academy can do about this, they would say we shouldn’t even try to get involved in this. It’s too messy and anyway, people always have a simple answer: All we have to do is fix the unions. Or fix the parents. You know, something really practical. So, the Academy really needs to focus on the areas where it can be effective. And the next slide shows a major area, which is the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Basically…we teach the teachers what biology one is by virtue of the way we teach biology one. We teach them what science courses are, and if we don’t have inquiry in our science courses, why should they? Anyway, how could they–they wouldn’t know what inquiry is, and that’s one of the major problems we have right now. We have all this wonderful elementary school curriculum, but the poor teachers who have taken only lecture courses…don’t know how to actually use it without a lot of help and assistance, which is called professional development.

There are really many challenges for our universities over these National Science Education standards…Colleges will continue to determine whether or not this science and education reform succeeds. I have a couple of slides of themes or major challenges to universities. The first is to recruit a large number of scientifically trained young people into the pre-college science profession. This requires that we make the world of k-12 teachers visible on campus. Invite the best [teachers], the ones that we most respect and [who] are leaders, into our science departments so that they get to meet the students and the students get to meet them. Provide supportive career advice to prospective teachers. You know, we spend a fortune advising pre-meds but discourage anybody who wants to be a teacher. There are programs that allow science majors to be certified as science teachers. Both Harvard and MIT have such programs, so if they can do it, why can’t everybody.

The second theme is to align university admissions policies with the standards. Every parent wants their kid to get into Harvard or Clark or one of these major universities. But if we are requiring that kids do well on the biology SAT II exam, which is about all those words, then parents will come down on the good teachers who are trying to teach the way we want them to teach…It’s unfair to teachers to have high-stakes examinations for college be a mismatch with the way we want science taught.

The next slide shows a continuation of this. We need to align introductory college science courses with the standards…Inquiry-based science and its relationship to society makes science relevant…And of course, the introduction of institutional rewards for science faculty who initiate a supportive setting of innovative programs for introductory college and k-12 education. So, there are many challenges for us.

What about the Academy? Well, the Academy can’t stand back. We need to do our best to make this thing work. Our main focus right now is to try to make a science out of education, evidence-based analysis about what works, evidence-based analysis about how to teach reading and how to teach math.